Measuring happiness

In my last journal entry I considered that when all of one's work is
completely unenjoyable, the best way to maximize happiness is to work
hard and invest in order to gain an early retirement. However, this
simple solution does not hold when one's work does hold some enjoyment
value. A person with an extremely enjoyable job has little motivation
to retire.

I'm in a position where I have a range of work options available.
Some are more enjoyable than others, and some are more profitable
than others. I'm wondering if my overall quality of life (taken
from a long-term perspective) can be improved by dropping some of my
less enjoyable tasks.

Last journal I discovered to answer this question properly, I need a
way to measure happiness or enjoyment in a meaningful fashion. On a
fundamental level I still don't have an answer to this. How does
one put attach a meaningful metric to enjoyment?

Even though I can't put enjoyment into quantitative terms, it's still
easy to order activities in terms of happiness (X is more enjoyable
than Y), and it's possible to describe other factors that directly
influence enjoyment. One of the strongest factors is freedom.

It's readily apparent that people value large blocks of free time
more more than the same time broken into smaller pieces. Instead of
taking their annual leave in the middle of the week and as soon as
it's been accured, individuals will instead save their annual leave to
go on a large holiday. People are more likely to take extra leave
adjacent to weekends and public holidays. An old employer used to
require a doctor's certificate for any sick-leave taken on a Monday
or Friday, since a more people were 'sick' on these days, in
gross disproportion to the rest of the week.

It's easy to see why contiguous time is so valuable. Given a large
block of time one can do everything that's possible in a smaller block
of time, but one also has the option to participate in many activities
that have a significant setup required. If I have an hour I can go
for a nice ride on my bike, but given six ten-minute breaks I'll have
to start turning my bike around by the time I get it out the door.
The most enjoyable activities such as diving, writing, coding,
and many games require a significant and contiguous time
investment, usually because they have a large set-up time, or take
time to get 'in-the-zone' and become productive.

If the aggregation of 'free-time' into larger periods is more valuable,
then one needs to consider not only how much time is saved or lost by
dropping a particular line of work, but also what effect that has on
overall free-time distribution. A new job that requires 10 minutes
every hour for six hours is more disruptive than a job that requires a
single sixty-minute block. This is why it's so hard to get employees
to go 'on-call': it's so disruptive to the range of activities
they can perform.

One of the interesting things that falls out of the value of consolodated
free-time is the efficient planning of work. Taking on disruptive (eg,
on-call) work has a large impact on enjoyment, but increasing the amount
of disruptive work has progressively less effect. If you're already
on-call for a business, then deciding to go on-call for a second business
may double your income, but will have a much less dramatic effect on your
free-time distribution. This suggests that when considering taking
on disruptive work, an all-or-nothing approach is preferable.
Performing disruptive work in moderation provides neither maximum
enjoyment, nor maximum income.

The other aspect which falls under the 'freedom' category is that
individuals value free-time more highly when they can choose when to
take it. A break is often more valuable if corresponds with the
breaks of friends, family, or important events (sporting, conferences,
a dive boat, or whatever takes one's fancy). So large blocks of time
are good, and being able to choose when to take that time is also
good. "Retirement" (having sufficient savings and passive income to
never work again) is the ideal, with close to maximum flexibility and
contiguous free-time.

Now, let's consider my personal situation. My income is 70% training,
which is enjoyable, has excellent pay, comes in blocks, and is often
flexible. 17.5% of my income is in the form of "block-consulting";
it's less enjoyable, has acceptable pay, comes in blocks, but is
rarely flexible. The remaining 12.5% is from on-call work; it's
rarely enjoyable, has slightly better pay than block-consulting,
is highly disruptive and never flexible. The disruption from the
on-call work makes it seem like more effort and time than it really
is, because it so frequently interrupts other work and activities.

I'm considering dropping that on-call work entirely. This will have a
very strong positive effect on flexibility and contiguous free-time,
but has the down-side of pushing out my retirement plans. Since only
money after living expenses is available for investment, losing that
12.5% has a disproprotionately large impact on my savings plan.

If we make the assumption that large blocks of contiguous, flexible
free-time have maximum enjoyment value, and that broken, unflexible
blocks during on-call work have minimal enjoyment, then the problem
becomes simple enough to examine mathematically. If dropping
'zero-enjoyment' work pushes out my retirements plans by a certain
factor, then it's worthwhile providing that my overall enjoyment
(approximated by contiguous, flexible time) is increased proportionately.

As an example, if dropping work were to double my required
time until retirement say from 1 years to 2 years
then this would only be worthwhile if it generated a full year of
contiguous, flexible free-time in the process. Note that's different
from generating a year's worth of free-time. One could have the
free-time already, but have low-quality free-time because it's
regularly interrupted.

The work I'm proposing to drop is not going to double my time
to retirement, so it only needs to make a more modest contribution
to my time distribution. It presently looks as if it will be
worthwile to let the work go, but closer scrutiny of how I currently
spend my time will be needed to say for certain.

Of course, it's easy to poke holes in all of my arguments above.
After a point one can encounter diminishing returns on enjoyment for
large blocks of free time. When busy and stressed, any amount
of free time is disproprortionately valuable, regardless of its
duration. Enjoyment of time is not binary value. While dropping
non-essential work in the short-term will have a negative impact on
income, it may actually be beneficial in the long-term as it provides
the opportunity for more fundamental changes to work practices, and a
greater focus on the more profitable core work of a business.

All these arguments can be used to argue both for and against a given
plan. This may be why many individuals never try to quantify
happiness, they simply move on gut instinct. That's probably going to
be a large deciding factor here, but I value the opportunity to
carefully weigh my decision before making it.

Unfortunately, due to numerous timing issues, I can't even begin to
implement any decision I make until the end of financial year. As
such, I have a little time to think and plan provided I can
find a long enough break in work, that is.

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